Waking up is a jump, a skydive from the dream.
Free of the smothering whirl the traveler
sinks toward morning's green zone.
Things start to flare. He perceives—in the trembling lark's
position—the mighty tree-root systems'
underground swinging lamps. But standing
above—in tropical profusion—is verdure, with
upraised arms, listening
to the rhythm of an invisible pumping station. And he
sinks toward summer, is lowered
into its blinding crater, down
through shafts of ages green with damp
quaking under the turbine of the sun. So ceases
this vertical flight through the moment, and the wings spread out
into the osprey's repose over streaming water.
The Bronze Age trumpet's
tone of exile
hovers over bottomlessness.

In the first hours of day consciousness can embrace the world
just as the hand grasps a sun-warm stone.
The traveler stands under the tree. After
the plunge through death's whirling vortex, will
a great light unfurl over his head?

Translation of"Preludium." First published in 17 Dikter (Stockholm, 1954). By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2007 by Rika Lesser. All rights reserved.

Born in Stockholm in 1931, Tomas Tranströmer worked as a psychologist for juvenile offenders for many years. His books of poetry include The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (New Directions, 2006), The Half-Finished Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2001); New Collected Poems (1997); For the Living and the Dead (1995); Baltics (1974); Paths (1973); Windows and Stones (1972), an International Poetry Forum Selection and a runner-up for the National Book Award for translation; and Seventeen Poems (1954).He is regularly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and has received several public recognitions for his poetry, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize.

Rika Lesser is the author of three books of poetry already published, and the forthcoming Questions of Love: New and Selected Poems. She has also published five books of poetry in translation--by Claes Andersson, Gunnar Ekelöf, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Göran Sonnevi--as well as translations of various works of Swedish or German fiction and nonfiction. Among the many grants and awards she has received for her work are the Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Fulbright Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize (twice), and the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy. Her translation of Hesse's Siddhartha: An Indic Poem will be published in the Barnes & Noble Classic Series next winter. She teaches both poetry and literary translation and resides in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

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